This invention relates generally to social networking systems and in particular to providing an indication of a user's opinion regarding content presented by a social networking system.
Social networks, or social utilities that track and enable connections between users (including people, businesses, and other entities), have become prevalent in recent years. In particular, a social network system allows users to more efficiently communicate information to other users of the social networking system. Typically, social networking systems maintain connections among their users and identify content likely to be relevant to their users. Social networking systems also collect and maintain information about their users. Examples of information about users maintained by a social networking system include static information such as geographic location, employer, job type, age, music preferences, and interests or dynamic information describing user interactions. Additionally, many social networking systems notify a user of actions performed by other users connected to the user.
Performing actions communicated to the social networking system allows social networking system users to interact with each other or with objects maintained by the social networking system. For example, users may post comments to pages associated with other users, view images, view video data, listen to audio data or perform other actions on various objects maintained by the social networking system. Actions performed by a user are frequently distributed to additional users connected to the user who performed the action. When interacting with other users or objects, users may seek to indicate their opinion or emotions toward the objects or users. For example, users may seek to indicate they dislike a post, that a post made them laugh, or that a post made them cry. While users may post written comments expressing opinions towards an object, an action performed by another user, or another user, it is difficult for a user to clearly convey emotion through written comments.